Adam Stovall’s genre-mashing directorial debut A Ghost Waits has been loved by audiences at film festivals and is now on Arrow’s streaming service. Nick Joy caught up with the director in a rare break between finalising the various extras for the Blu-ray disc release and he explains how his film got made, as well as the challenges and delights of low budget film-making.

We’re all living in a strange world at the moment. Are you keeping safe?

I’ve managed to stay healthy by essentially staying inside and not going anywhere since March last year. It’s not the greatest of fun, but with the numbers here in the States astronomically rising, I count myself lucky to have not caught COVID – I know a lot of people who have had it.

Have you been using the isolation time productively? Has it served as a muse?

Yes. FrightFest Glasgow was in early March 2020 and I’d never really travelled outside of the United States before and I didn’t want to waste the opportunity for a free trip to Europe. I went to London for a week – I now have the weirdest view of London because it wasn’t crowded and the Tube was empty – I got home and then lockdown happened. We’ve had a lot of interest out of Glasgow and one of the companies that reached out also asked about future projects. I sent them a bunch of stuff and one of them was a sci-fi anthology pilot for a series. I realise that people aren’t really looking for pilots, they’re looking for films, so I shifted things around and have spent a couple of months really grinding on the script.

And you’ve also been working on the Blu-ray of A Ghost Waits.

Yes, Arrow decided that they wanted to release A Ghost Waits and that has kind of taken over my life because I’ve been working on special features for the Blu-ray. I’ve got a couple more weeks of work ahead of me on the Blu-ray and I’m really excited once that’s done to be able to write again. I’m really behind on writing work. I’ve got a lot that’s still go to go into this sci-fi script. It’s given me chance to put it down and breathe and work things out in my head. So, when I’m able to pick it up again, I think it’s going to go very fast.

Has it been a challenge for you to promote a film during lockdown?

Yes, in obvious ways it’s been much more difficult, but early on I decided that you either lament something or celebrate something. So often, life comes down to a matter of perspective. I can lament the fact that Glasgow is the only live person festival that we’ll have and there won’t be the networking – which sucks, or I can embrace it. One of the amazing things was seeing that Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead were going to be there with Synchronic. I love Justin and Aaron’s movies, Spring is legitimately one of my favourite films. So the idea that I would get to meet them was great – on the first night Aaron and I spent the evening talking and we were in each other’s phones! There wasn’t that experience at the other festivals – I didn’t get to meet the other filmmakers. I got emails but it wasn’t the same as being in a bar at 3am with somebody. So I decided they instead of lamenting this it is far easier to travel this way – you just hop on Zoom!

That’s a positive way to look at things.

Yes, and it’s been a little easier for me to wrap my head around the success of the movie. I feel that if 2020 had been a normal year I would have been overwhelmed. But as it was, everything happened on my laptop, which gave me just enough distance from it. I’m very wary of internalising too much, especially because this movie has been received so well. It’s helped stop me from becoming a toxic person – ‘Everyone calls me a genius, so I must be a genius. Hey, the genius has something to say.’

You have a grounded experience of making movies.

I remember telling MacLeod (Andrew’s, co-writer and star) that when you make a movie for this amount of movie, you don’t have to worry about the four quadrants. You don’t have to worry about one quadrant. You can make a movie for nine people. This movie isn’t for everybody, but it’s for somebody. We just have to find them. The response in Glasgow was 400 strangers laughing and crying and thanking me for the movie afterwards. One of the lessons I learned when making it is that the movie is the boss – I am not the boss of the movie. If the movie doesn’t need a scene, the scene will not work. You can try to force your ideas But the movie will be better if you humble yourself before it and recognise when it tells you ‘no’. This movie got so much better when creating that space.

How did you apply this practically?

It always started with the cold open of the family leaving the home and the reveal of Muriel, but then it went to this 5½ minute breakup scene where Jack and his girlfriend have this huge fight. I remember shooting it and we struggled a little with it – was it right? And then editing it I tried so long to make it work and it never did. At some point I accepted that it didn’t belong there.

There are three big deleted scenes that will never see the light of days because they hurt the film. They aren’t bad scenes, or bad ideas either, but we learned that every time we left the house outside of the ghost realm we broke the spell, so we just had to cut away. Simplicity was a guiding light on this film – our North Star – because a lot filmmakers when they make their no budget movie feel like it can’t look cheap so there’s all these affectations, but it still looks cheap. We are ambitious with this but we go for simplicity, doing something as cleanly as we can and not try to throw a bunch of stuff at it to distract from the fact that we made if for less than a nice new car costs.

Muriel is terrifying at the beginning – and we need that or we wouldn’t buy her as being an effective ghost. That wrong foots you, you start softening towards her and before you realise it, you’re watching a romantic comedy. The horror festival crowds are typically served strong, scary material – how lovely it is that they were able to embrace your film, which is so much softer than typical festival fare.

You know, while the movie always had that cold open, it originally had a more traditional horror soundscape. We did a big ‘friends and family’ screening for my 40th and found some folks struggled with it. ‘Am I supposed to laugh at this? Can I laugh at this?’ We needed to figure out a way to let people know that it’s intentionally funny. MacLeod had the idea to put a song in. Between playing with footage and cutting some stuff away, we made changes. We had to throw out some many ideas and find a better way to do it that would convey what we were trying to do. For a film like this, tone is so tricky. We have different tones.

Using black and white helps set the tone.

Part of the reason why black and white really worked for us was that it’s a heightened story told in a grounded way. I love the operatic manner of gender storytelling. One of the things that I’ve always loved about live opera is that it’s just people on a stage. Maybe there’s someone on a harness flying around, but typically it’s just people on a stage. You look at them, see the floor they’re standing on and their physical body, but the sound they’re making is what transports you – it’s the transcendent part of it. We can make something a bit more elastic if it feels natural.

Your performances are very natural.

MacLeod said that he wanted to give a performance that was close to self, that was transparent and unfiltered, so what you’re seeing is a performance that for the most part is MacLeod. Natalie (Walker, Muriel) has this huge personality. She is brilliant and hilarious and can sing – my God, I saw her do a show Off Broadway and she got to blow the doors off the place. I had a feeling that we could handle all these different tones and genres if it always feels right and works within the world of the story.

Did you ever have pressure from the financiers to shoot in colour?

No. We got really lucky. This movie has been a string of miracles. One financier liked my ideas and said he could give me X amount of dollars. And then my mom had said for a while that I should let her know when I had an amount in mind, and if she could help, she would. So I called her up, told her I had this amount and if she could match it I was pretty sure I could make a movie. She got back to me, said yes she could do it, I started crying, and then realised I had to write it.

And then you had to make it.

Getting the money was really easy, we just didn’t have a lot of it. We burned through all of it in principal photography and had nothing left for post [production], which was fine because I was editing… and didn’t know what I was doing. Why would I need money in post? Once I realised we had to do pick-ups I realised we couldn’t bring people back because we couldn’t afford anything. MacLeod flew back in and it was just him and me. We’d asked John, whose house we’d shot in, if we could go back – he always said yes, because he’s amazing – and put our own money in. If you can get more money, do that. But don’t be afraid of having to subsist on elbow grease and ingenuity.

How important is it to the marketing of a low budget film to be shown at a festival?

The gentlemen at FrightFest changed my life. We owe them so much. Arrow was a presenting partner at FrightFest and saw how the movie played. I could tell that they were curious. But it’s that thing – it played well in one room, let’s see if it plays well in a second room. We would email now and then to stay on their radar and then we played the digital FrightFest in London in August 2020, Total Film did awards for that. It plays against Aquaslash, which I though was really wonderful piece of programming.

People from Glasgow had been really positive on social media, and when it came to the digital screening in August, people were again going on Facebook and Twitter and saying how much they liked it. Even in the bad reviews it was more a case that they did don’t like what we did but they still confirmed that we’d made the movie we intended to make.

Seeing the response, and then Total Film gave us Best Actor, Director and Picture – that kind of sealed it for Arrow, who realised that there was an audience. I had no ideas that there would be awards, so I woke up at 6am to go to the bathroom and I saw a bunch of people had messaged and Tweeted me. What a nice way to wake up!

So then Arrow reached out and said that they decided they wanted to acquire it and we negotiated back and forth for a while. I was speaking to Aaron Moorhead and he said to me: ‘Dude, Arrow wants to put out your first film. Maybe just say yes and not worry about it. People would give up body parts to have Arrow distribute one of their films. You won the lottery, so just hand the ticket in!’ It’s been amazing.

How difficult has it been to define the film to those who know nothing about it. In many ways it’s not the film you think it’s going to be.

If I have just two seconds, I say it’s a haunted house love story, and then if they ask what it’s about I say you’ve got a guy whose job is cleaning and fixing rental properties and he’s sent to a troubled property where everyone leaves, he discovers that it’s haunted, and falls in love with a ghost. I’m not really afraid of telling people that they might not like this movie because it’s such a small and personal film. I don’t begrudge anyone that doesn’t like it. I’m amazed that it’s had the reception that it’s had. I worked really hard on it, so I’m not amazed that there’s people who like it, but that it’s been so well received.

And you now have a trailer too.

We’ve been putting the trailer together and I hate it when the trailer gives away the whole movie, because what’s the point of seeing it if you know how it ends? MacLeod and I had both taken a run at cutting a trailer, but neither of them worked because we were trying to underplay it. We were being more judicious and underselling it. The guy at Arrow had a go and decided to get it all in – let’s let people know that there’s romance, horror, comedy. He did a really good job of capturing the tone. A friend of mine watched it and said ‘Doesn’t this give away everything?’ Well, if you’ve already seen the movie it feels like they’ve given away a lot, but if you haven’t, it plays as non-sequiturs. All you get is a vague notion of what happens.

I remember interviewing Gareth Edwards about his movie Monsters and he said: ‘ This is the budget I can live with. If everything is a disaster, I can repay this money. I’ll be working a lot, but I can repay this.’ That gave him the freedom to make what Monsters was, a genre fluid thing. I use that philosophy too – it’s not a lot of money. Even if we self-distributed, there was a good chance we’d be able to pay people back, and because of that I didn’t have to worry about a million dollars worth of ticket sales. That would be amazing, obviously. I want Arrow to be very happy. If this is for you, I think you’re going to love it. If it’s not for you, you might still find stuff to like. Someone on social media said ‘Did not care’ and I’m totally fine with that. I don’t feel pressured to force it. People work hard on stuff every day, it doesn’t mean other people have to care about it.

I’m deliberately steering clear of discussing the ending, not least because it caught me off guard and I’d like others to experience that too.

One of the most common responses that we see is ‘I didn’t expect to be crying my eyes out at FrightFest’. The ending was how I knew we had a movie. When I had the idea, I thought I was good and I knew how to pull it off. The assembly cut was really bad – about an hour and 50 minutes – but the ending worked. This told me that we had something. Going back to Glasgow, I was a bit of a nervous wreck. I got up and did an interview with Alan Jones then went back to my hotel room and had a panic attack. Alan asked if I was going to sit with the audience and I said yes, but I would be next to the exit in case I had to run. I sat down, it started and the experience of finally sitting in a theatre and watching a movie that I had made, with 400 strangers, was a moment I’ll always remember.

The response was immediate.

People were laughing, they were crying, they were gasping. Then we had a Q and A afterwards where I cried, and afterwards people were coming up to me, hugging me and thanking me for the movie, being very vulnerable and honest, telling me specifically how it had spoken about their own life or their partner. In one case this man told me how he was really excited to watch it with his spouse because it would facilitate a conversation they had not been able to have. That is the goal with art – connection. To me, the most transcendent thing in the universe is when two souls find each other and connect. I had no idea if this was going to work or not and the fact that it did is validating, is encouraging. I finally have self-esteem, which is really nice.

In our review, I highlight Natalie’s wonderful performance. In black and white, her face looks like Sally from A Nightmare Before Christmas, with those sad eyes.

She’s going to love that so much. That and The Corpse Bride were key influences.

If the spark between her and Jack wasn’t there, it would be all for nothing.

We got really lucky. Muriel was originally written for a friend of ours, who got cast on a TV show and couldn’t do it. I had been following Natalie on Twitter and had been really impressed – she’s really funny and insightful – and I discovered she was an actress. I went to her website to see if there were any clips, and there weren’t, but her email was there, so wrote to her, introduced myself, said I was making a movie in Cincinnati and that I thought she’d be really good for a role I’d written, and would she mind if I sent her script. She said ‘yes please’, she really dug it, taped an audition, and the second she starts you know that’s Muriel. She and MacLeod met on set. The first thing that we shot is where she sings at the end and she just came to play and had all this energy. We got really lucky.

What have you got lined up next?

I’m really excited about picking back up this time travel road movie, finishing the draft and getting in everything I’ve been thinking about, and see what they think. Hopefully we can get going. What’s really nice about the companies that are interested is they have their own money and don’t have to go elsewhere to approve a budget. I’m trying not to waste any momentum. I know that making one movie doesn’t prove that you can make another movie, it just proves that you can make one. I’m learning to not be afraid of that.

 

Thanks to Tom at Fetch for arranging the interview. Arrow (formerly Arrow Video Channel) presents the exclusive premiere of A Ghost Waits on 1st February, ahead of a premium Blu-ray and Digital HD release in May.